Last week brought the annual handing out of gongs for the best in UK store design at the 11th Retail Interiors Awards and a glittering event it was, as wine flowed (rather too) freely and the design cognoscenti danced ’til dawn.

And looking down the winners list, many of the UK’s great and good walked away with silverware. There was, however, one very significant addition and that was Oxfam, which clinched the award for best small shop.

In the past, had somebody said that a charity shop would take top honours in this class, a fairly typical reaction might have been wry amusement. But this is no longer so – and this charity’s Westbourne Grove outlet stands as a prime example of the “push for posh”.

Spend time talking with consultancy Echochamber and that is a phrase that crops up again and again and goes a long way towards capturing today’s retail design zeitgeist. The push for posh takes in everything from Primark to C&A with its Avanti format in Germany, and is all about being cheap – or providing value, to be politically correct – without making shoppers feel like “cheap asses”, as somebody put it recently.

All of which can only be a good thing for cash-strapped shoppers or even those that feel that they might be so in the not-too-distant future. The trend can only accentuate the problems of being a mid-market operator, however. Retailers in this arena are already under pressure and have precious few resources to throw at making themselves better than the encroaching value merchants.

And it looks as if it might become even more difficult if shoppers find the value-based propositions appealing and decamp in large numbers, as has reportedly been the case with retailers such as Aldi and Lidl. It is worth stating at this point that German hard discounters do not as yet feature as part of the push for posh phenomenon, but fashionistas continue to head in their droves to retailers like New Look in search of cheap chic and like what they find.

The question, therefore, is what can a mid-market retailer do to confront the value threat without investing huge additional amounts on store redesigns? Ingredient X has to be service; something that is broadly incompatible with a value formula, but which can be achieved using existing resources by those caught in the retail’s middle echelons.

Sounds relatively simple really, but with all that’s happening at the moment it’s easy to see how it might get overlooked. Now more than ever it’s time for a degree of focus on service. Many in the mid-market might have regarded it as a peripheral aspect of retailing, but it can – and should – be a real differentiator.

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